Some images from recent EAA observing sessions:

December 1st through 3rd, 2024
June 15th, 2024
October 8th, 2021

Description of what EAA Observing is and what it does:

EAA is "Electronically-assisted" astronomy.  With this type of observational astronomy, the camera substitutes for your eyeballs at the telescope.   Typically the observer live-streams and stacks together many short-exposure sub-frames of around 5-10 seconds exposure time for each subframe, for a total stack time of 10-20 minutes for each object before moving on in the sky to the next object to be observed.

The full stack of subframes is then saved onto the pc hard drive out at the telescope as a single Master Frame for further basic software processing later if desired.  You then slew to the next object on your observing list and repeat the process.

There are several multiple software apps available to automate these EAA routines.  SharpCap is one of the primary apps used to image the objects shown on these EAA webpages.

EAA gives you the following advantages over just observing with your eyes:

• The camera is far more sensitive than your eyes at detecting light photons.  You see much more of the object on your pc screen as the image accumulates and is stacked together from inside the software.

• You can setup the live-stream telescope feed into an indoors pc from your telescope.  This allows you to escape the outdoor weather environment and can make it much more enjoyable to observe under extreme cold or hot conditions, or if mosquitos and other bugs are heavy in your area.

• Camera filters and pre-processing tools inside the software apps allow you to cancel out most of the light pollution that may be present at your observing location.  So you can get a much "deeper" and lower-noise image from EAA that shows more detail even in light pollution than your eyes could ever show.  Your eyes can't accumulate light photons over time like the camera does either, so this adds more brightness and details to the stacked live-stream images.

• You still have the advantage of being able to "observe" the object while imaging it.  You're just observing from a pc screen as it live-streams and accumulates the image, but at a greater detail than your eyes can do.  So with EAA you get the best of both worlds....you can still observe live but you also get to have a saved image for each of your observing targets when the session is over for the night.

• The downside of  EAA is your total stack times and sub-exposure times are very short for each object, and have poor SNR quality to work with in your post-processing steps.

  This means that your processed images are not as high-quality as long-exposure ones and are useful mostly for just sharing with friends or keeping a permanent personal logbook record of the observing session.

  But the goals are totally different for EAA compared to long-exposure imaging:  you just want to do live observing.  But you also add the extra element of approximating on a pc screen what your eyes would have seen if observing out at the telescope in the traditional way, while taking advantage of the extra object details and light pollution cancellation that the camera gives you compared to your eyes.

  And a big plus for this approach is that in light-polluted locations, EAA gives you a useful way to keep observing and actually see good details in deep sky objects.  Not a bad trade-off at all, and this also allows you to see many objects in a night similar to live visual observing vs. long exposure imaging where your telescope scope may have to stay trained on only one object for several nights in a row.

  
  

wcv
12/11/2024